“I told myself, I don’t care how ugly and hard caregiving can be. It’s okay because I’m writing these poems. It’s the process of giving life to something versus the process of dying.” ~ Frances H. Kakugawa

Last week I read a poem that stopped me in my tracks.

It was written in the voice of an Alzheimer’s patient and reminded me of my Auntie Ella, who suffered from dementia. Some of you may remember my Thanksgiving post from a few years back, where I mentioned how grateful I was to have seen her in Hawaii just two weeks before she died.

It was of course heartbreaking that someone I had been close to for so long didn’t recognize me at all. Instead of the always-up-to-something, forever baking, reading, and talking-a-mile-a-minute aunt I’d grown up with, I saw a faraway stranger wholly dependent on her son, the victim of a baffling disease that daily threatened her human dignity and robbed us of a beloved member of our family.

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